Month: February 2013

To follow up on the Alex Smith-to-Kansas City trade news… (which won’t be official until March 12 at the earliest and if I know the 49ers, they will not utter a word of confirmation until the moment the paperwork is filed)…

* Multiple NFL sources indicate that the 49ers had every intention of doing right by Alex Smith, and that was the spirit of every bit of their discussions after the season–with him and with other teams.

The 49ers have the framework of a deal to trade Alex Smith to the Kansas City Chiefs for a second-round pick this year and a similar pick–possibly conditional on his playing time and the Chiefs’ success–in the 2014 draft, an NFL source told the Mercury News.

This follows Fox reporter Jay Glazer’s report earlier today that the 49ers have agreed to a deal with the Chiefs. My source fleshed out the compensation, which is almost double the haul coming back to the 49ers than most observers expected.

Another NFL source cautioned that no deal can be official until March 12, hinting that the 49ers could wait for someone else to up the ante, but didn’t deny that these talks are very far along.

This might be the last one of these I do, we’ll have to see how next year goes…

It used to be worthwhile (at least to me) to scrounge through all this stuff to highlight the very good players who somehow never made the All-Star team–as a reminder to myself and to anyone who chose to read these lists (or disagree with them).

The Warriors might go ahead and do something major by the trade deadline at noon today, but I checked again last night and a team source reiterated that nothing big was brewing and nothing big is expected.

CBS’ Ken Berger reports that the Warriors are in discussions with Sacramento to trade a few of their minimum-salary bench players–it’d have to be a combination of Kent Bazemore, Jeremy Tyler or Charles Jenkins–in order to dip under the luxury-tax line, with the incentive of giving the Kings some money to do take the contracts.

That makes sense, because if the Warriors believe they might get over the line and stay there in ensuing years (a very real possibility with the big contracts they’re carrying), the repeater rules (for three seasons in a row over the line) are very rough.